Staff Cloud Security Engineer

Company Description

At Qualtrics, our mission is to close experience gaps—the costly differences between what customers and employees expect, and what they’re receiving. 13,000+ organizations worldwide and more than 80% of the Fortune 100 rely on the Qualtrics Experience Management Platform™ to collect, analyze, and act on feedback—more feedback than they ever thought possible. With Qualtrics XM, organizations can manage the four core experiences of business—customer, employee, product, and brand experience. Organizations can be at every meaningful touchpoint, for every experience, and predict what will resonate most with customers and employees.

The Challenge

As Qualtrics continues to expand the Experience Management (XM) SaaS platform, we must ensure that we’re protecting our customers and their data by building and operating secure systems. With over twelve hundred software & system engineers contributing to Qualtrics XM every day, we have a large attack surface to evaluate and secure. This role is critical to our mission.

Qualtrics is seeking an experienced security engineer/architect with a passion for security and demonstrated expertise in cloud and infrastructure security. The selected candidate will provide technical leadership and subject matter expertise within the Infrastructure Security team and across the product engineering organization.

The Infrastructure Security team is responsible for measures to improve and ensure the security of infrastructure used to operate and deliver Qualtrics SaaS products. The team’s scope includes cloud (IaaS/PaaS), workload orchestration (Kubernetes, Nomad), containers, data stores and server OS, as well as CI/CD and related systems. Infrastructure Security works in collaboration with other teams within the Information Security organization, including application security, vulnerability management, network security, security operations and incident response, and security assurance. The team also partners with our infrastructure (i.e., SRE) and platform engineering and developer experience teams. 

A Day in the Life

• Review system designs and implementations, and consult with engineers across the organization to identify and/or avoid security issues through alignment with security standards and best practices; document and ensure security issues are appropriately remediated
• Leverage your accumulated subject matter expertise of Qualtrics systems and infrastructure to propose design patterns and drive architectural improvements which address classes of security flaws in the platform
• Develop and implement the cloud & infrastructure security architecture and contribute to program strategy and roadmap plans
• Document and improve cloud/infrastructure standards and guidelines
• Promote DevSecOps principles and implement Infrastructure as Code (IaC) scanning and policy enforcement to ensure new systems deployed via Terraform, AWS CloudFormation, Code Development Kit or similar methods are secure and compliant with standards and guidelines
• Deliver training and provide mentoring to engineers and staff on security topics
• Participate in or lead internal purple and red team exercises to proactively evaluate Qualtrics environments for security flaws; perform manual 
• Perform the selection, design, development, implementation and management of automated security testing tools (e.g., cloud security posture management (CSPM), network/host/image vulnerability scanners); maintain relationships with product vendors

The Expectation for Success

You will define and drive improvements to the cloud and infrastructure security program; mentor other security engineers; and provide expert guidance and work effectively with the Qualtrics engineering organization and fellow security team members to protect our customers and their data by building and operating secure systems. A qualified candidate may also be asked to manage other security engineers and direct the work performed by the Infrastructure Security team.

Skills That Will Lead to Success

• Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science or a related field
• Over 10 years of relevant work experience
• Experience as a senior/staff/lead security engineer in cloud, infrastructure, product or network security
• Multiple years of experience managing and securing AWS services and workloads
• Experience leading multi-month security projects and initiatives that require collaboration with teams across an organization
• Sound understanding of cloud security vulnerabilities, defense techniques and security best practices, including AWS-specific security practices and present-day threats
• Strong working knowledge of AWS services and security concepts including Service Control Policies (SCPs), Identity and Access Management (IAM), VPCs, ELBs, CloudTrail, and security groups
• Experience with modern cloud infrastructure, including EC2, Linux-based operating systems, docker containers, workload orchestration (Kubernetes, Nomad), data stores (relational DBs, NoSQL and document DBs (Elasticsearch), object stores (S3)), event streaming (Kafka)
• Knowledge of system and infrastructure hardening and monitoring best practices

Preferred Qualifications

• Experience with securing the infrastructure of large, complex SaaS applications
• One or more relevant security certifications (AWS Certified Security - Specialty, CCSP, CCSK, GCSA, AWS Certified Solutions Architect or DevOps Engineer)
• Prior full time SRE, cloud engineering or software development experience
• Team lead, tech lead or management experience
• Experience managing vulnerability scanning tools and/or CSPM